Hollywood Reporter: Time’s Up Teaming With USC Annenberg Professor to Launch Diverse Critics Database. “As stars and studios continue to call for more diverse film critics, Time’s Up and Annenberg Inclusion Initiative director Dr. Stacy L. Smith are stepping into the fray with a new database of diverse critics and journalists. Called CRITICAL, the forthcoming opt-in database, open to all, aims to connect underrepresented film critics and journalists with publicists, studios, film critics associations and talent. Over 200 critics and journalists have created profiles so far after being contacted by CRITICAL or friends who forwarded CRITICAL’s email about the initiative.”

NPR: Doctoral Student Compiles Database Of Indigenous Women Who’ve Gone Missing. “As many as 300 indigenous women go missing or are killed under suspicious circumstances every year in Canada and the U.S., but the exact number is unknown because the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t really tracking the numbers. ‘I would venture a guess that if we did have the data, it would show that native women are more disproportionately represented,’ Annita Lucchesi says…. Lucchesi is a doctoral student at the University of Lethbridge in Canada now. Back when she was working on her master’s thesis, she tried to find the total number of indigenous women who were either killed or went missing in U.S. and Canada.”

National Parks Conservation Association: Eliminating Species Act: Senate Legislation Threatens Wildlife and Wild Lands. “Senator John Barrasso hosted a hearing today in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) on his draft Endangered Species Act Amendments of 2018 legislation. The draft bill proposes to radically weaken the Endangered Species Act, which has been the nation’s most effective law protecting wildlife in danger of extinction. The legislation undermines reliance on best available science and reduces public involvement in the process of adding ESA protections to species. The more than 500 plant and animal species with habitat in our national parks are chronicled in a new online database, launched this week by National Parks Conservation Association.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: YouTube Shows Searchable Hashtags Above Video Titles. “YouTube now displays hashtags on videos that can help users search for and discover other videos about the same topics. Currently, hashtags appear on videos viewed in a web browser and the Android mobile app. Hashtags are not shown in the iOS app.”

TechCrunch: Facebook and Instagram change to crack down on underage children. “Facebook and Instagram will more proactively lock the accounts of users its moderators encounter and suspect are below the age of 13. Its former policy was to only investigate accounts if they were reported specifically for being potentially underage.”

Lifehacker: Subscribe to a Podcast From the Beginning With Cast Rewinder. “I have a bad podcast habit. I keep discovering great, long-running podcasts and downloading their entire backlogs. Right now I’ve queued up 128 episodes of 32 shows. Maybe I should use Cast Rewinder, which sends you one old podcast episode at a time.”

Smashing Magazine: Linkbuilding: The Citizen’s Field Guide. “Tired of hearing about cryptocurrency? It’s high time we took a closer look at hyperlinks and how they are one of the biggest currencies in the SEO world. This quick field guide aims to help you protect your website, improve your marketing or simply discover why so many people troll the comments section with strange links!”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: The Accent Gap. “Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are spearheading a voice-activated revolution, rapidly changing the way millions of people around the world learn new things and plan their lives. But for people with accents — even the regional lilts, dialects and drawls native to various parts of the United States — the artificially intelligent speakers can seem very different: inattentive, unresponsive, even isolating. For many across the country, the wave of the future has a bias problem, and it’s leaving them behind.”

The Next Web: Cloudflare launches free protection for election websites. “Cloudflare has launched a new initiative, called the Athenian Project, to protect electoral websites from online attacks. The service is available free of charge to state and local governments, and offers Cloudflare’s enterprise-level security and reliability services.”

TorrentFreak: Russia Has Permanently Blocked 3,400 Pirate Resources. “Site-blocking is the in-vogue anti-piracy mechanism and in this respect, Russia is taking matters to extremes. According to an announcement from the authority tasked with managing Internet restrictions, more than 3,400 online resources are now subject to permanent blocking after being sanctioned by either the Moscow City Court or Ministry of Communications.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Calvin News: Calvin Prof Using AI To Hear Whisper In Twitter’s Whirlwind. “When looking at Twitter, computer science professor Keith Vander Linden formerly saw noise: a continuous roar of chaotic 280-character messages. From this tumult, however, he now discerns meaningful patterns: ‘if you look at enough tweets,’ says Vander Linden, ‘with the right kind of statistical models, you can derive a signal from that, you can find out information about what people are saying about stuff, and from that you can infer what they are thinking.'” Good morning, Internet…

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